How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[Beleg85]

1 hour ago, Battlefront.com said:

Not directly related to the war, but another example of Russia's continued importance to the far right movements around the world.  In this case German police busted a domestic far right terrorist organization, intent on toppling the German government, that was actively trying to get support from Russia.  One Russian was arrested along with two dozen others.

This should be a reminder to the West of why it is so important to knock Russia out completely.  The amount of trouble it causes, large and small, is cumulatively an enormous threat to the stability of democratic countries around the world.  Russia is as much of an exporter of misery as the Soviet Union was.  It would be very nice if that tradition came to an end.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/07/world/europe/germany-coup-arrests.html?campaign_id=190&emc=edit_ufn_20221207&instance_id=79523&nl=from-the-times&regi_id=77867169&segment_id=115251&te=1&user_id=06eb42ecc9056dd32ea63af0c30707b6

Steve

Perhaps German members of this board will now more -what are opinion in Germany about whole issue? Frankly all of it seems so grotesque it is hard to believe. They supposedly wanted to put guy called "Heinrich XIII, Prinz of Reuss" on the throne...:)

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/heinrich-xiii-prince-suspected-plotting-be-german-kaiser-coup-2022-12-07/

It seems so dumb and glued out of reality it may actually direct toward Russian influence indeed.

Edited December 7, 2022 by Beleg85

[danfrodo]

6 minutes ago, Beleg85 said:

Perhaps German members of this board will now more -what are opinion in Germany about whole issue? Frankly all of it seems so grotesque it is hard to believe. They supposedly wanted to put guy called "Heinrich XIII, Prinz of Reuss" on the throne...:)

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/heinrich-xiii-prince-suspected-plotting-be-german-kaiser-coup-2022-12-07/

It seems so dumb and glued out of reality it may actually direct toward Russian influence indeed.

This kind of stupidity is amazing.  As if the reichstag holds some kind of magic sword of power and whoever yields it will be made king.  "We have the reichstag!  Power is ours, ba ha ha ha ha!"

[sburke]

6 hours ago, kraze said:

no different from you telling me that people who are invading my country are in fact against the invasion then

so when exactly did that Belarus invasion start?

[TheVulture]

29 minutes ago, danfrodo said:

This kind of stupidity is amazing.  As if the reichstag holds some kind of magic sword of power and whoever yields it will be made king.  "We have the reichstag!  Power is ours, ba ha ha ha ha!"

Obviously the police, army, state governments and all the social, governmental, economic and legal institutions in Germany will accept the change calmly and obediently.

I can't begin to imagine how these nutbags thought this was going to work. It's the same as the sovereign citizen loonies (many countries seem to have some kind of equivalent) that seem to think there is some kind of magically pre-existing 'law' that governs how things work, rather than it all being something that is basically the implicit consensus of everyone in the country. 

[dan/california]

4 hours ago, The_Capt said:

I don’t know where they pulled their data from but I have no doubt there are accuracy issues, especially the further back you get.  In reality this graphic is probably conservative as a I do not see the conquest of the Americas or Africa, which resulted in massive loss of life. The Holocaust is lowballed at about 4.4 million, depending on where one sticks the circle.

The point of course is not any one conflict but the reality that we have been doing war everywhere-all the time throughout history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll

A lot of stuff here:

https://slides.ourworldindata.org/war-and-violence/#/title-slide

This from the Pinker school of decreasing violence over time, which could be the flip side argument that we are evolving away from war but I am not entirely sold as it relies a lot on deaths per capita, which is slippery.  Are we really more peaceful or has our population base accelerated faster than we can kill each other?  It also really only focuses on post-WW2 which is too short a period to determine if we are indeed becoming more peaceful or just pausing.  

As to “why do we count everything?”, well it is an attempt to understand our environment better through math I would guess. I mean democracy is founded on counting things in order to understand collective will better. We count deaths to try and avoid them in the future (e.g. COVID)- a human thing I suppose.

 

Smallpox, measles, and tuberculosis conquered the Americas, the fighting was barely a rounding error by comparison. Also a demonstration that disease resistance is probably the single biggest evolutionary driver in the short to medium term. The black plague in Europe in the 1200s is the other truly well known example. But epidemics also probably had more to do with the fall of theRoman Empire than anything else.

[Kinophile]

FTW again 

[The_Capt]

9 minutes ago, dan/california said:

Smallpox, measles, and tuberculosis conquered the Americas, the fighting was barely a rounding error by comparison. Also a demonstration that disease resistance is probably the single biggest evolutionary driver in the short to medium term. The black plague in Europe in the 1200s is the other truly well known example. But epidemics also probably had more to do with the fall of theRoman Empire than anything else.

Ah, the "sorry I sneezed on you" angle.  Well yes and no.

https://www.se.edu/native-american/wp-content/uploads/sites/49/2019/09/A-NAS-2017-Proceedings-Smith.pdf

While I am sure that is comfort for the indigenous people who died at something like 80-90 percent of their pre-contact populations - it directly links to a secondary effect of warfare, disease.  One cannot uncouple the two, nor the evolutionary pressures of disease and warfare combined.

Example - Black Death and Mongol Invasions - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death_migration#:~:text=It was reportedly first introduced,Southern Europe%2C whence it spread.

And then there is famine.  Fighting drives people who survived disease off their lands and food energy intake tanks. 

There are four horsemen for a reason.

[JonS]

Dont drag peng into this

[Fernando]

27 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

Ah, the "sorry I sneezed on you" angle.  Well yes and no.

https://www.se.edu/native-american/wp-content/uploads/sites/49/2019/09/A-NAS-2017-Proceedings-Smith.pdf

While I am sure that is comfort for the indigenous people who died at something like 80-90 percent of their pre-contact populations - it directly links to a secondary effect of warfare, disease.  One cannot uncouple the two, nor the evolutionary pressures of disease and warfare combined.

It was NOT the case in the Spanish Americas. The Spanish system did not look for the extermination of the Indians, just the opposite. There were large epidemic diseases in New  Spain in 1520, 1545 an 1570, and several smaller ones during the 16th century that reduced the indigenous population to al least one half of the previous one. It was not war, but disease. 

New Laws of the Indies for the Good Treatment and Preservation of the Indians, 1542:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Laws

Some people didn't apply this kind of laws even in the 19th and 20th century. That is the reason Spanish America has a large indigenous population today. 

[FancyCat]

Recall the Russian VDV soldier who fled from the war to France and got a fancy book publishing deal? He’s a ****ter.  I hope France revokes his asylum.

 

[Kraft]

3 hours ago, Zeleban said:

But despite this, support for Ukraine has not weakened, has it? Perhaps the military support of Ukraine is not so much dependent on public opinion? After all, there are other factors affecting the support of Ukraine by the West (political struggle, the interests of industrial giants and big business)

The coffer of old rusty soviet gear we can write off to make the MIC happy for new contracts has almost been emptied, there is discussion (again^2) of sending western MBTs but Im pessimistic.

IF public support was higher, it would have already happened. Let me remind you, there are hundreds! of Leo1s, Marders,.. some already refurbished, still collecting dust in storage, owned by a private company, that is being denied by the government to sell those to Ukraine, and thats not because Germany hates profit generating firms!

As I said in the beginning, there is a difference with a lot of people between "im pro Ukraine" vs "lets risk (no matter how nonrealistic this is) getting nuked because we send tanks". Even in this thread the "nukes" topic has been beaten to a pulp, resurrected several times and still lumbers around waiting to return for another 10 pages of what ifs..

Im sure once the genie is out of the bottle (western tanks, that is) people will ease up but this seems to be a very tough line to cross, despite its necessity in the long run.

 

[Kraft]

3 hours ago, Zeleban said:

But after all, Russia will also have to divide its forces and logistics, and this will certainly affect its offensive capabilities in the east. I have already said above that significant Ukrainian forces are already on the border with Belarus, they cannot take part in the battles in the east. So would it not be wiser to respond to the blows of the Russians? As practice shows, Russians understand the language of violence much better than any other existing

This is not the case, as Ukraine is not going to Invade Belarus, just with the Russian border, its a dead end roadblock that will not get crossed to keep a clear and very distinct division between who is the attacker and who is the defender, so Russia does not need to station its armies there in any worthwhile capacity.  

Edited December 7, 2022 by Kraft

[FancyCat]

Kraft is not wrong, as much as the West’s aid policy is assisting Ukraine, easy lay ups like Leopard 1s, that would save more Ukrainian lives are instead placed on the wayside in favor of freaking BMP-1s, the MIC would love to get up and running but defeated by the need to not provoke Putin or Russia or scare Scholz. (I care not for logistics or whatever bull****, the fact is western tanks don’t give as much suffering for their crews when hit, but we still have Germany being terrorized at the idea of Ukrainians living)(I will not hide my disgust, the mraps illustrate how useful western aid is, yet here we are just waiting for scholz to grow a freaking spine)

Interview with Zelensky, a deep contrast to the beginning of the war, instead of seeking merely for a return to pre-invasion, he hopes to ensure this is the last invasion by Russia. And he makes a good point, every generation of Ukraine has suffered, what is more suffering now compared to passing it to the next generation? I doubt ukraine will seek to end this war without ensuring the end of the Russian interference in Ukraine, and that requires the liberation of the Donbas and Crimea. Only then can Ukraine join NATO, for NATO will never be confident enough to accept an Ukraine without complete territorial integrity and therefore, no more Russian constant aggression and interference with overtones of civil war and internal conflict.

A Ukraine that accepts the loss of the Donbas and Crimea, paves the way for further annexations down the line. Especially after the 4 annexations this year.

https://time.com/person-of-the-year-2022-volodymyr-zelensky/

 

[The_Capt]

35 minutes ago, Fernando said:

It was NOT the case in the Spanish Americas. The Spanish system did not look for the extermination of the Indians, just the opposite. There were large epidemic diseases in New  Spain in 1520, 1545 an 1570, and several smaller ones during the 16th century that reduced the indigenous population to al least one half of the previous one. It was not war, but disease. 

New Laws of the Indies for the Good Treatment and Preservation of the Indians, 1542:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Laws

Some people didn't apply this kind of laws even in the 19th and 20th century. That is the reason Spanish America has a large indigenous population today. 

Ok I think we need to self moderate here because this is getting way off topic.  I recommend everyone who is still interested, read up on European colonization and its effects - there is plenty out there.  

My overarching point is that one cannot uncouple war, disease, famine or economic damage - and going waaay back to the original sub-thread, we were weighing the effect it may have on human evolution.

But lets put a pin in all that and get back to the war in Ukraine.  

[Battlefront.com]

7 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

Ok I think we need to self moderate here because this is getting way off topic. 

Good call!  Because you will never believe what I was in the process of scrolling down the page to post

Steve

[poesel]

3 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

Not directly related to the war, but another example of Russia's continued importance to the far right movements around the world.  In this case German police busted a domestic far right terrorist organization, intent on toppling the German government, that was actively trying to get support from Russia.  One Russian was arrested along with two dozen others.

2 hours ago, Beleg85 said:

Perhaps German members of this board will now more -what are opinion in Germany about whole issue? Frankly all of it seems so grotesque it is hard to believe.

2 hours ago, danfrodo said:

This kind of stupidity is amazing.  As if the reichstag holds some kind of magic sword of power and whoever yields it will be made king. 

First, I need to explain, who these guys are. A "Reichsbürger" (translates to 'citizen of the (Kaiser)Reich') is someone who does deny the existence of the Federal Republic of Germany. Instead, they believe that the Kaiserreich still exists. There's some quite funny legalese reasoning to explain this.
They wanted to topple the government and even had some old royal descendant who would then become Kaiser(?).

There is no connection to the Reichstag which is just the building of the parliament.

The round-up is the biggest ever here, even bigger than the ones we had against the left-wing terrorists in the 70s. It is of course all over the news here.

 

How dangerous is this group? Depends on the scope.
As a group to Germany itself, not so much. They have no backing in the population, and their plans are just delusional.
As individuals who cause acts of terrorism, more likely. They had the skills and the means.

The whole thing is bizarre, but unfortunately not the funny kind. I'm very happy that the state caught this group before something happened.

 

[Beleg85]

48 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

Good call!  Because you will never believe what I was in the process of scrolling down the page to post

Steve

Checking true lineages of Hohenzollern descendants in order to decide which line deserve a potential throne of Germany?

Ok, if not- it was just me...It seems Prinz Heinrich is a baloney, and crown rightly belongs to Georg Friedrich, Prince of Prussia.

34 minutes ago, poesel said:

As a group to Germany itself, not so much. They have no backing in the population, and their plans are just delusional.
As individuals who cause acts of terrorism, more likely. They had the skills and the means.

The whole thing is bizarre, but unfortunately not the funny kind. I'm very happy that the state caught this group before something happened.

Interesting. Do they have any real Russian connections? And if they deny existence of Bundesrepublik, why they were even walking free? It is literall treason.

Edited December 7, 2022 by Beleg85

[Bulletpoint]

Prince Heinrich XIII is 71 years old.

Who else is 71 years old?

Putin.

Coincidence? I think not.

 

And what about this number 13, the unlucky number?

How many letters in "Vladimir Putin"?

Edited December 7, 2022 by Bulletpoint

[NamEndedAllen]

7 hours ago, The_Capt said:

I don’t know where they pulled their data from but I have no doubt there are accuracy issues, especially the further back you get.  In reality this graphic is probably conservative as a I do not see the conquest of the Americas or Africa, which resulted in massive loss of life. The Holocaust is lowballed at about 4.4 million, depending on where one sticks the circle.

The point of course is not any one conflict but the reality that we have been doing war everywhere-all the time throughout history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll

A lot of stuff here:

https://slides.ourworldindata.org/war-and-violence/#/title-slide

This from the Pinker school of decreasing violence over time, which could be the flip side argument that we are evolving away from war but I am not entirely sold as it relies a lot on deaths per capita, which is slippery.  Are we really more peaceful or has our population base accelerated faster than we can kill each other?  It also really only focuses on post-WW2 which is too short a period to determine if we are indeed becoming more peaceful or just pausing.  

As to “why do we count everything?”, well it is an attempt to understand our environment better through math I would guess. I mean democracy is founded on counting things in order to understand collective will better. We count deaths to try and avoid them in the future (e.g. COVID)- a human thing I suppose.

 

With respect, I think you are going down one of many trails - a quite interesting one indeed, but just one of a great many. The modern term “war” has suddenly been expanded to cover all human conflict and migration since the beginning of time. But that does not distinguish from any and all forms of life on earth, including the flora (which is pretty violent, even if in very slow motion)! The idea of “war” defined thus way as a singular shaper if Homo sapiens is vague and generalized such that it can describe any competition within an environment or a migration to a new one, by any and all species. The members of all species fight over scarce resources, unless they are in a symbiotic relation, or a time of niche equilibrium with well-established non competing species. The human population groups experience is not generally different than most other species on the planet. And that is where DNA evolution takes place.

Everything being discussed is Cultural Anthropology and Archeology. And cultural “evolution” is what some specialists in the field call their various theories addressing the more general subject area of Culture Change. There is no general agreement on one theory of how cultures change, or whether there can be such a theory, and whether and how “evolution” might apply to it. The field is notoriously replete with new theories of the day, and the book you referenced and its related conference here at the University of Oregon is one of them. I am *not* dismissing the interest in it. Rather what may be too quick an uncritical seizing upon one idea, one branch on a very complex, fuzzy tree of theories in this field. Understandable, because it focuses on one’s own profession? Regardless, there is a lot of speculation here. Agreed that that chart is questionable and a data set of unknown provenance. At first glance it lacks face validity - already pointed out by another post here. But really it looks like an attempt to suggest that a putative shaky history is causal, biologically. 

I have to say the terms “fictional environment” and “artificial environment” specifically are problematic. Fictional environment as used sounds like story, or when viewed from a different culture, mythology. There isn’t any DNA evolution specific to Russia’s story about Ukraine and Russian history - any more than in say, “Manifest Destiny” in the USA history. *All* cultures create stories that prop up their core beliefs and justifications. An example:  

All those Old Testament chapters recounting the generations of kings is a “fictional environment” established after the two Hebrew Canaan kingdoms of Israel in the low lands and Judah were nearly wiped out by the Neo Assyrian Empire. Only the hill located kingdom, Judah, remained, although as a subject of that empire. Revolts led to Judah’s destruction and  the famous exile. After the fall of the successor Babylonian Empire, the remaining Judah members filtered back to their original Canaan territory, sparsely inhabited. But to establish legitimacy as the single head of a new kingdom, the leadership created a tale of familial succession stretching back to the founding of the kingdoms. This became the founding myth of the new kingdom, Israel. Stories - myths - bind people together. This can certainly help maintain a population group’s identity, and its rules about sex and reproduction

[NamEndedAllen]

5 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

Not directly related to the war, but another example of Russia's continued importance to the far right movements around the world.  In this case German police busted a domestic far right terrorist organization, intent on toppling the German government, that was actively trying to get support from Russia.  One Russian was arrested along with two dozen others.

This should be a reminder to the West of why it is so important to knock Russia out completely.  The amount of trouble it causes, large and small, is cumulatively an enormous threat to the stability of democratic countries around the world.  Russia is as much of an exporter of misery as the Soviet Union was.  It would be very nice if that tradition came to an end.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/07/world/europe/germany-coup-arrests.html?campaign_id=190&emc=edit_ufn_20221207&instance_id=79523&nl=from-the-times&regi_id=77867169&segment_id=115251&te=1&user_id=06eb42ecc9056dd32ea63af0c30707b6

Steve

Another verse in the epic song, “Rust Never Sleeps”.

However creaky and weird Russia’s “governance” and actions may be, it does do many things at the same time. The various GRU and other entities’ ongoing, years’ long work to undermine European and USA democracies is one of the more strongly determined projects. 

[NamEndedAllen]

3 hours ago, dan/california said:

Smallpox, measles, and tuberculosis conquered the Americas, the fighting was barely a rounding error by comparison. Also a demonstration that disease resistance is probably the single biggest evolutionary driver in the short to medium term. The black plague in Europe in the 1200s is the other truly well known example. But epidemics also probably had more to do with the fall of theRoman Empire than anything else.

Excellent point. These population catastrophes have huge impacts on reproductive selection! They affect the entire population group, sometimes creating what termed a genetic “bottleneck”. The gene frequencies that remain in the survivors are the only inheritances passed down to succeeding generations. That is an immediate, hard and fast causal impact on evolution.

[poesel]

35 minutes ago, Beleg85 said:

Interesting. Do they have any real Russian connections? And if they deny existence of Bundesrepublik, why they were even walking free? It is literall treason.

AFAIK they tried to talk to the Russians but got no answer.

You can think what you like, that is no treason. But if you refrain from paying speeding tickets because you deny the existence of the state that issued said ticket - then you are in trouble.
And yes, that really happened.

[Battlefront.com]

1 hour ago, poesel said:

First, I need to explain, who these guys are. A "Reichsbürger" (translates to 'citizen of the (Kaiser)Reich') is someone who does deny the existence of the Federal Republic of Germany. Instead, they believe that the Kaiserreich still exists. There's some quite funny legalese reasoning to explain this.
They wanted to topple the government and even had some old royal descendant who would then become Kaiser(?).

There is no connection to the Reichstag which is just the building of the parliament.

The round-up is the biggest ever here, even bigger than the ones we had against the left-wing terrorists in the 70s. It is of course all over the news here.

 

How dangerous is this group? Depends on the scope.
As a group to Germany itself, not so much. They have no backing in the population, and their plans are just delusional.
As individuals who cause acts of terrorism, more likely. They had the skills and the means.

The whole thing is bizarre, but unfortunately not the funny kind. I'm very happy that the state caught this group before something happened.

 

There are right wing nutjob groups like this in the US, loosely branded as the "Sovereign Citizens".  They hold all kinds of crazy theories they believe means the government has no authority over them.  Their behavior ranges from anarchists to people similar to Reichsbürger.  Recently near me a whole bunch of "Rise of the Moors" followers were arrested when their car broke down and the occupants "pulled security" with rifles right there on the side of the highway!  They were on their way to do some militia training in the woods in a car with fake license plates, no insurance, and no registration.  Any chance of them toppling the US government?  Nope, not these deep thinkers.  Extorting, threatening, harming, and killing individuals?  Yup, lots of that.

Anyway, the point of bringing them up is that this group in Germany was actively seeking help from Russia.  It would be nice to not have that be an option any more.  We have enough problems with extremists, we don't need them to get help from Russia.

Steve

[NamEndedAllen]

3 hours ago, The_Capt said:

it directly links to a secondary effect of warfare,

Respectfully, you are reducing everything to a vague use of “war”. The impact of disease spread by contact of population groups happens regardless of whether there is ANY or none at all conflict.  This hypothesis has become a bridge too far! 

[Kinophile]

And a post too far, my friend

Ref Steve's further up....  

 

 

(don't get me wrong - epidemiological,  societal and environmental impacts on human development are absolutely my cuppa tae!) 

Edited December 7, 2022 by Kinophile